Call for Proposals

The Call for Proposals is now closed.

The MW program is built from the ground up, based on your suggestions for sessions, papers and presentations. Proposals are encouraged on any topic related to museums creating, facilitating, delivering or participating in culture, science and heritage through networked technologies – wherever the network may reach.

There are more than a dozen ways to participate in Museums and the Web!

Offer a Pre-conference Workshop: Are you an expert in your field? Share your expertise by leading a half-day or full-day pre-conference workshop! Workshops are held the day before the conference begins and workshop leaders are compensated for their teaching. No written paper is required.

Present a Formal Paper: Share your leading work in the field through a written paper (required, up to 5,000 words) and an oral presentation in a conference session (approx. 20 min. plus discussion). All formal papers are published on the Museums and the Web site, and selected papers are published in the eBook and printed proceedings of the conference.

Lead a Professional Forum: Convene a one-hour discussion or debate about timely and critical topics of interest to the museum community. No written paper is required.

Teach a How-to Session (a variant on the “mini-workshops” of previous years): You have one hour to demonstrate and teach a practical skill or best practices for a museum topic. A written version of your session (required, up to 2,500 words) will be published on the Museums and the Web site to serve as an on-going reference both for attendees of your session and others.

Demonstrate your project and explain the designs and the decisions that went into it to colleagues in an exhibit-booth setting. Demonstrations are only open to museum professionals and projects created in a non-profit environment. Commercial organizations are invited to demonstrate their products and projects in Exhibitor Briefings.

Give a Lightning Talk, Pecha Kucha-style, in a 1.5 hour session that includes 6 lightning talks of 7 minutes each plus plenty of time for questions and discussion. Slides and recordings of the lightning talks will be published on the Museums and the Web site, and presenters are invited to blog about their topics (up to 1,000 words) on the MW site.

Propose and lead an Unconference Session: topics are selected by attendees during the first day of the conference so the conversation can continue throughout our time together.

Participate in a Crit Room:Panels of leaders in the museum field will provide a free assessment of your web or mobile project for accessibility and other best practices. Sign up in Spring 2013 for a critique on a first-come, first served basis (approximately four projects can be assessed in each 1.5 hour crit session).

Participate in a “Birds of a Feather” round-table: lead the discussion or dip into several while enjoying breakfast with colleagues. Topics are proposed by participants during the MW conference in the run-up to the breakfast.

Participate in Best of the Web: propose your project or vote for your favorites! Help us share the best of museums’ digital work in a wide range of categories to inspire the global community. Nominations for the Best of the Web awards open in February each year.

Be there: the best part of MW is always meeting informally with some of the most creative and innovative museum professionals from around the world and enjoying the warmth and generosity of this community. Join us!

Performances? Hack-a-thons? Maker Faires? Other interactions or services? Propose any other format of participation + explain how it works. We’re open to new ideas.

One thought on “Call for Proposals”

Q: What is the difference between a formal paper and a demonstration?
A: If the words “case study” come easily to mind when describing your proposal, it may be more appropriate as a demonstration than as a paper. Papers should not focus on a single project and its results, but rather include comparative analysis of a number of projects, even if a single “case study” is the starting point for the wider survey. By the same token, the results or findings of a project in a paper should be reported in a way that they can be reused or inform future projects. In other words, papers should have a wider applicability beyond reporting on a single case study in isolation from the rest of the field.
If, on the other hand, your work has so far revolved around a single project or case study, the demonstration format is a great place to present your results and start to collect information on similar or related projects towards developing a comparative analysis and paper for next year!